


my pictures show me how much i’ve lost

by Anonymous



Series: graveyard for the loved and lost [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe, Angst, Gen, Humor, Pity, Sad Humor, double harry potters, may turn into a series(?)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-21
Updated: 2021-01-21
Packaged: 2021-03-12 18:40:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28764942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Harry isn’t anything special.He knows this. He learns to like it. He can’t scorn it, because its fact, not fiction, and nothing comes from refusing fact.It’s just, he knows he could’ve been something more. Harry can feel it. He just didn’t know what more meant.Considering he’s here of all places, well, this was probably what more meant.[au!harry switches places with canon!harry, oneshots until i get the motivation to make a series]
Series: graveyard for the loved and lost [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2110419
Collections: Anonymous





	my pictures show me how much i’ve lost

Harry isn’t anything special. He knows this.

He learns to like it. He can’t scorn it, because its fact, not fiction, and nothing came from refusing fact. 

It’s just, he knows that everyone expects more. He knows this. It’s nothing new. He may have almost been the boy-who-lived, and now wasn’t, but that didn’t meant things were easier.

His parents were James and Lily Potter, head auror and potions master. In comparison, Harry was.. to say the least, average.

He got average grades, decent friends, and although he was placed in Gryffindor, was because of his parents. Harry still remembers the first words the hat told him. _“You don’t fit into any house at all.”_

It echoed like a shattered plate on the floor. The words were layed out flat in front of him, and all he could do was blink, open mouthed.

He’d waited for this his whole life, brought up on stories of Hogwarts and practical jokes his father would play. 

His father would reassure him, that if was alright if he wasn’t in Gryffindor, it was alright if he was a little brainier and was placed in Ravenclaw, if he was nicer and more hardworking, and placed in Hufflepuff. 

(James bites off the speech about being alright if hes placed in Slytherin—but he’d better not turn into _that_ , you know the one, snivelling git, though Lily cuts him off before he can, placing a reassuring hand on her son’s cheek, telling him that every, and any, house would be great.)

But he’d never expected the hat to tell him he wasn’t fit for any of them. 

Harry stutters, rapidly blinking. His thoughts have gone blank, and not even the hat can trace any faint resemblance of anything coherent, before another beat of silence and a short, clipped ‘Gryffindor!’ is erupted from the old tool.

Nothing was out of the ordinary. He was Harry Sirius Potter, Gryffindor golden boy of a previous Gryffindor golden boy(and girl,) and that was the end of his story. 

He knows, that everytime his charm doesn’t come out right, that when his potions are a little greener than what the example shows, that when his needle doesn’t turn into metal on the first try — people, always the same ones, are _disappointed_. 

He, Harry Sirius Potter, was _supposed to be special_. It was all in a days work, these expectations. Nothing came from listening to them, but it wasn’t like they weren’t real, either.

Harry isn’t anything special. He knows this, and he likes this. But sometimes he wishes he was. Maybe he could be the boy-who-lived.

He _knew_ Neville — _knew_ how hard it was to be him, how hard it was not to have his parents, but he was, in short, extraordinary. His life was planned out for him from the day Voldemort blasted his front door open. 

Harry knows it’s selfish. He’s got a family. Neville does not. Harry has his mum and dad and his godfather and uncle and his sisters, but all he can do is sit his pathetic corner of self pity. Harry knows hes selfish and pathetic and a little self pitying bastard, but he cannot help it. 

He thinks, no, _knows_ , he’d like being the boy who lived.

Maybe only for a day, because he’d have loved and lost and pictures would remind him that he had, but if it was for a day, that day would be everything. 

In the end, Harry gets what he’d wished for. He ignores the pictures plastered at every corner, every picture frame in his room, every moving photo album carefully hidden under the bed, and revels in whats happened.

Yet, it isn’t for just a day. Days, weeks, and almost a month has passed, and he has not gone back.

The pictures, the picture frames, the moving photo albums, haunt him. He can’t ignore them from any longer, so he doesn’t, and he cries.

He cries for the first time since before he’d left, because he’d loved and lost, and wished for this. He wished for the world where he was the boy who lived, and had not realized what he’d done.

Harry knows that there is so, so much different in this world. 

It’s, maybe, just maybe, enough for him to stop mourning like the day would never pass, but it sets him down the next same spiral. 

Sirius is alive. Peter is not. 

Sirius — his father’s Sirius, the Sirius that played around and laughed and pulled jokes with his father, the Sirius that only lived on in those pictures, only lived on in his parent’s and relatives memories — was alive.

And yet, he was everything Harry did not expect.

He’d betrayed his family. Killed Peter. Was in _Azkaban_.

This Sirius, was not _his_ Sirius.

This Sirius would never be the Sirius that his father would make play dog figures out of magic run and bark around his room, the Sirius that James Potter told stories of every night. He could never be.

And this Peter couldn’t be _his_ Peter either, because he was gone. Dead. Gone. And Sirius _killed him_.

Sirius killed his bestfriend and betrayed his brother. He left Remus alone, to cope with the grief of losing his family. His only family.

Then there is the matter of him, who is not him. He is Harry Sirius Potter, son of James Potter and Lily Potter. His godfather is Peter Pettigrew, and his ‘uncle’ is Remus Lupin. 

Sirius sits as a brave and strong stone headstone in Godric’s Hollow, because the war did not spare anyone.

This Harry, the Harry he is now, isn’t him. He’s Harry James Potter, son of James and Lily Potter. Peter is dead. Sirius is incarcerated. Remus is.. as good as dead.

And Harry stays here, on Privet Drive, without a clue as to who these people are. 


End file.
